Ya pop-eyed runt with a tiny knife from the series What Photography & Incarceration have in Common with an Empty Vase

Whilst knife-related crime is up by 24% in the UK in the pat two years almost everything about our assumptions about these types of crime is wrong.

Knife crime is not an inner city or gang problem. The majority of teenage knife deaths take place outside major cities. The overwhelming majority of those killed by knives in Britain in the last 40 years are not black. The overwhelming majority of young people caught carrying knives today are not involved with gangs.

These images represent a selection of knives and other bladed weapons analysed by the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, which were used in serious crimes over a period of 2 years. However, for Martins these blades do not necessarily just talk of violence and crime. They are not mere still-lives. They are portraits, stand-ins for the individuals that once held them. They depict different individual dispositions, body shapes and temperaments.

They are ‘lipographs’, a term coined by Martins. A lipograph (a concept inspired in the Oulipo movement’s lipogramme) is a visual representational device, which omits its referential subject. It is the proverbial impossible document.